IT was announced this week that the former Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies is to be made a Conservative peer.
Nominated by Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, a politician she greatly admires, she tells me: “Being made a peer was a very proud moment and a high point in my life.
“I’ve known since June, but you have to sit on it.
“Around September, I asked if I could tell my dad, who is 90 in January. Obviously, he is bursting with pride.”
The first time Sharron swam for her country, she was just 11.
At 13, she represented Great Britain in the Olympics and the European Championships.
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Sharron also competed for England in the Commonwealth Games.
By the end of a 20-year career that ended with her retirement in 1994, she had won a total of eight major international medals.
She moved into commentating for the BBC, and championed bringing the Olympics to London in 2012.
She has also been active in charities, such as Disabled Sport England and Sports Aid.
In 1995, she joined the cast of TV’s Gladiators, as Amazon.
Sharron, 63, who lives near Bath, describes herself as a patriot. She says: “If you cut me down the middle, I’d be Union Jack.”
In recent years, she has become known for speaking out against biological men competing in women’s sports, and gets frustrated by headlines that say she is campaigning to “ban trans women”.
“They are men,” she says. “We are not ‘banning’ anyone.”
Onslaught of abuse
In 2019, when the International Olympic Committee removed the requirement for athletes who identify as women to have had sex reassignment surgery, it was a step too far for Sharron.
She wrote to the IOC, pointing out the unfairness of allowing biological men to take part in female-only sports — and was backed up by more than 60 other world-class athletes.
No one is banned from sport. You’re not allowed in this category because you don’t qualify for it
Trans activists accused her of bigotry and transphobia.
“I have nothing against anyone who wishes to be transgender,” she says.
“But to protect women’s sports, those with a male sex advantage should not be able to compete in women’s sport.”
Sharron and I first met as kindred spirits in the war on gender ideology, and I understand the bullying that she has endured.
She has received an onslaught of abuse from the so-called LGBTQ community, with outrageous slurs directed at her.
They’ve called her racist, antisemitic, homophobic, bigoted — and transphobic.
Sharron says: “How ridiculous, calling me racist. I was married to a black man (Olympic athlete Derek Redmond, who she divorced in 2000).
“I had bombs sent to me by Combat 18 (a neo-Nazi terror group). I’ve got mixed-race children.
“We’re in a world where so many lies are dressed up as kindnesses.”
For example, says Sharron: “No one is banned from sport. You’re not allowed in this category because you don’t qualify for it.”
She explains that it’s the same as a 15-year-old boy not being allowed in the under-12s race “because he doesn’t qualify for it”.
She adds: “We have categories across all of these things to try and give the most number of people in society an opportunity. And the biggest difference is sex.”
Trans activists have even threatened the lives of her children — as Sharron says: “People don’t understand how vicious they are.”
Yet she has stuck to her guns, and this year, she and sailor Tracy Edwards formed the Women’s Sports Union to protect and grow female participation in sport.
She tells me that the “protect” bit is the priority right now, “because we want to get back fair sport for women at every level, not just at the elite”.
Sharron’s beloved mum died from a Hepatitis C-infected blood transfusion in 2017.
“She worked until she was 70 and never complained. It was her money that paid my bills after I lost all my work,” she tells me.
“She would be proud, looking down at me and going, ‘It was a good use of my money, Sharron’.
“In the world of sport, we genuinely have been waiting for a woman to be paralysed or killed for the last ten years.”
She says of boxer Imane Khelif, a biological male who competed against a woman at last year’s Paris Olympics: “I honestly think that they should have been charged with criminal negligence.
“But it did wake a lot of people up.”
It’s the cowardice that I find so scary and makes you realise how terrible things in history have happened because good people stay quiet
Here in the UK, Sharron tells me she’s “astonished” nothing has been done after the Supreme Court win on the definition of a woman.
She says: “The Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson is sitting on this guidance, which I’ve seen, which says it’s indirect sex discrimination to allow males to be in female sport.”
I ask how she has endured a decade of bullying and harassment, but there is nothing self-pitying about this brave, stoical woman.
She simply keeps returning to the fact that some women have had it worse than she has.
Why did so many people and institutions back down in the face of trans activists and stand against women’s rights?
Sharron says: “It’s the cowardice that I find so scary and makes you realise how terrible things in history have happened because good people stay quiet.
“I’m very much a live and let live kind of person. I always have been, but I’m also a very truthful kind of person, and I can’t keep quiet.”
She tells me the misogyny has shocked her, saying it is worse than it was in the 1980s.
Sharron explains: “It’s hidden and horrible and sinister and back-stabbing now. I really believe in listening to everybody and trying to do what I think is the right thing.
“I do believe in aspiration. And that’s probably the biggest reason why I’m now more Conservative.”
‘Long way to go’
I ask about the planned puberty blocker trials on children, and she says: “When I get to the House of Lords, I just want to be able to try and help young people.
“You can’t say to a 12-year-old, take this puberty blocker, just because today you don’t want to grow up.
“That’s not how you’ll feel in ten years’ time when you have grown up and gone through puberty and you’re just some lovely gay guy.”
Other projects she is keen to talk about include improving children and young people’s mental health.
She says: “I want to see more kids doing sport and off their phones. I want to understand why we’ve allowed pornography to get where it is, why we’ve allowed kids to get addicted to their mobiles.”
Sharron is particularly concerned that girls are dropping out of school sports at a younger age.
I will use my voice to support all of those fighting this ideology as best I can
She says: “We used to lose girls from sport at 14 and 15, now we’re losing them at 11.”
Sharron wants to encourage girls to be physically active instead of worrying about what some person on the other side of the world thinks of their outfit. But what about her daily routine?
“I’m in the gym three or four times a week still,” she tells me. “I’ve got three kids and I’ve got two grandkids. And my favourite day of the week is Grandma Day.
“So when Kemi asked me to become a peer, I said, ‘So long as I can still do Grandma Day’.”
For many, Sharron, who published her book, Unfair Play: The Battle for Women’s Sport in 2023, is a crucial ally in the campaign against trans-identified men in any female-only spaces, such as hospital wards and rape crisis centres.
She insists: “All I’ve ever been is pro-woman. I’m not anti-anybody.”
Even two years ago, the idea of her getting a peerage would have been unthinkable as she was deemed by some to be beyond the pale, with her opinions on the transgender issue.
Is she hopeful for the future? “We still have a long way to go,” she sighs.
“But this peerage shows how much the tide has turned.
“And I will use my voice to support all of those fighting this ideology as best I can.”
